Over the millennia Native Americans had come to the island to hunt sea birds but avoided living there permanently. They, like many of the more recent prisoners and guards, felt that bad spirits haunted the island. In the late 1800s, more than a dozen ‘non-compliant’ Hopi chiefs who wouldn’t farm as the government instructed them to and opposed forced education in government boarding schools were incarcerated there. A sixteen-year-old Native American man, Clarence Carnes, was one of the men whose escape attempt triggered the Battle of Alcatraz in 1946. Carnes’ parole was revoked twice, returning him to prison. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1988 and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Later that same year, organised crime figure James ‘Whitey’ Bulgar, who had befriended Carnes while on Alcatraz, paid for his body to be exhumed and reburied on land in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. This small historical detail moves me. Many snippets I hear over my time on the island move me. Nuggets small as the bullet casings that still turn up on the western side of the island. One day I found one, tangled up in the ivy that was, in turn, tangled in the Aeonium. Tarnished brass. Light as a feather.
We found other things as well. Bones, bits of metal, broken plates. One day an intern found a stone arrowhead that was sent off for analysis. The remains of a polystyrene totem pole sat under the piles of gum leaves that had accumulated near the docks, the remnant of the totem pole carving classes held during the occupation. Because we were dealing with archaeological finds, albeit accidentally and occasionally, we attended a lecture given by specialists on ways of dealing with these objects when we found them.
The plants themselves are archaeological relics of a kind. UC Berkeley professor Russell Beatty has described the garden’s 145 species, planted by soldiers, guards and inmates over a period of more than a hundred years, as ‘a significant botanical achievement’, which held clues to Alcatraz’s history. ‘Like some of the inmates, they either made it and survived—if they were adaptable—or they didn’t,’ he said.1
Before the gardeners and the Native American acts of place-making, before it was a prison, Alcatraz was home to the seabirds. With the exception of the pelicans after which the island is named, birds have returned in their thousands. Snowy egrets, cormorants and night herons jostle for space beside the aggressive western Pacific gulls. The gulls have built nests all over the island, through the prison’s ruins, and stand guard around its perimeter.
The birds, the gardens, the Native American occupation—all these seem essential to an understanding of what the Rock has become and the effect it can have on people. I volunteered over two bird-breeding seasons, which took place around each April into May. I’d walk down to the snowy egret colony. Photograph them. Sketch them. Listen to them. They are impossibly elegant birds with long trailing feathers, more delicate than any lacework, but, hilariously, they make a sound not unlike a cat vomiting up a hairball. The chicks are round and fluffy, with red feet that turn yellow as they get older. The demand for their extravagant plumes as decoration for women’s hats almost drove them to extinction but the introduction of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918 helped the populations recover. (The Trump administration has issued a reinterpretation of that hundred-year-old act that substantially weakens it. ‘Incidental’ or ‘unforeseen’ harm can no longer be prosecuted: for example, the killing of a million birds as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 is no longer considered a crime.)
Snowy egrets never used to breed on Alcatraz but now they nest in bramble so thick it keeps everyone other than the odd Pacific gull (a murderous bird if ever there was one) away. When I saw them there was always a mother front and centre, and indeed when I went back through my paintings and photos I realised I’d photographed her time and time again over the fifteen or so months that I was there, without recognising she was the same bird. On my last day on the island, after the morning tea at which I was served Anzac biscuits and applauded, I went and found her a final time. She lifted her wings so they reached out to their full extent and held them up high, wing tips almost coming together. She showed me her bones, her wings, her feathers. San Francisco, sitting not far away across the water, framed her. I’m not sure if it was the constancy of my attention, the repetition of my appearance, that led to her to display herself to me in this way. Perhaps I was just lucky.
It was on Alcatraz that I met people who’d actually been born in San Francisco. Rare as hen’s teeth. White retired teachers, young people who were going to college rather than working in their parents’ business, an (award-winning!) organic composter who’d lived in the Mission back in the fifties, during the time it had been an Irish neighbourhood as well as a Latino one. Working the compost gang was a much sought-after position for us volunteers, but I only managed shovelling honour a couple of times. I met Bernie supporters, Hillary supporters, a solitary Trump lover, disabled adults brought to work on the island by carers. I caught the ferry once, occasionally twice, a week and watched pelicans fly past our windows in single file, saw fur seals swimming in winter, watched the muscular currents sweeping around us and wondered, for the thousandth time, did those guys really get away?
During the time I gardened there I returned to Melbourne to see Dad, and during that time I gave a talk to a group of primary school students in Clifton Hill about spending time at Alcatraz. I told them that the island sat inside San Francisco Bay. That it was a forbidding rock that rose high out of the sea, capped off by an imposing cell house and a lighthouse. That nine hectares of rock has come to mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I told them that the gardens were originally developed and tended by the military in the late 1800s. I told them about Elliott Michener, the counterfeiter-turned-gardener who planted the spectacular succulent gardens on the western side of the islands in the 1940s. He had no horticultural background but he studied books and pored over seed catalogues that guards gave him. Michener ended up working in the home and gardens of the warden, Edwin Swope. Mrs Swope, also a keen gardener, used to lay bets on horse races on Michener’s behalf. When he was transferred to Leavenworth he was not happy. ‘I believe that my best and only practical course is to get back to Alcatraz [where] I could at least grow Bell roses and delphiniums seven days a week and enjoy considerable freedom and trust, and in general make the best of things.’
One day I shuffled slowly down the steep western slope, in the cold bright autumn sun, helping replant the ‘Persian Carpet’. First planted in the 1920s, the carpet is formed from ice plants (Drosanthemum floribundum) matted together. It was these plants that first enticed Michener as he was retrieving softballs outside the recreation-yard fence. He requested permission to start tending the ice plants the balls landed on, and transformed the hillside into a wall of flowers that helped hold back erosion while blooming pink and purple for several months of the year. They’re known as survivor plants.
‘Survivor’ means all kinds of things, but in the context of the gardens at Alcatraz it’s a reference to the two hundred or so plant species on the island that grew through the forty-year hiatus in care between the closure of the prison in 1963 and the arrival of the gardeners. A ninety-year-old fuchsia down by the Sally Port is one such survivor. The Persian Carpet another. Being a survivor outside Alcatraz has less cachet, and elsewhere the ice plant has been rebranded as ‘invasive’, which means that work gangs rip it out by the handful along coast roads. The plant was originally brought in from South Africa in the early 1900s. It stabilised the soil, but it pushed native plants out. On Alcatraz, though, every plant was both an invader and a survivor.
I never talked to the schoolkids about the reputed hauntings, though they would have enjoyed a ghost story or two. No tourist, child or adult, comes out of the hole—a pitch-black soundproof cell where troublesome prisoners were kept for up to nineteen days—without a look of horror on their faces. But for the most part things were pretty jolly on the Rock when I was out there. One of the rangers had an impressive voice. She greeted tourists by singing Alcatraz facts to the tun
e of Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’. A couple of times a week, a former prisoner called Bill Baker spruiked his memoir. He’s in his eighties now and spent more than half his life in prison, four years of it in Alcatraz, and had done, he told us ‘some bad things’. He got married during the time I worked there, in the particularly beautiful garden known as Officers’ Row. Eloy Martinez, a member of the occupying Tribe of All Nations who once lived in a cell overlooking the island’s dock with his wife and small son, now comes across from Oakland from time to time to give a tour of occupation sites across the island.
The students I spoke to had already got wind of the story of the escape attempt of 1962, during which Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers left papier-mache heads on the pillows of their beds, squeezed into ventilation ducts through openings they’d dug with modified spoons and slipped off the island on a raft made of raincoats, never to be seen again—unless you count the fictional versions of them in Escape from Alcatraz. My audience listened patiently as I went on about geography and gardening, then their teacher told them they could ask questions. One little boy politely raised his hand.
‘How do you make a papier-mache head?’ he asked.
‘Balloons,’ I told him. ‘Fill them up with air and slather them with newspaper and glue. Use hair swept off the floor of your local barber.’
A few weeks later I passed the message back to these miniature escape enthusiasts that one of the gardeners had taken a video of a great white shark not far from the landing dock on a day I wasn’t on duty. The shark leapt out and grabbed a seal just as all the tourists were boarding the ferry. There was a lot of blood. ‘Believe me,’ I said to the kids, ‘those guys did not get away.’ I didn’t manage to crush their dreams, though. After my talk they drew treasure maps and researched a variety of escape possibilities. Their teacher sent me pictures in case they might come in handy.
One and a half million visitors head out to Alcatraz each year keen to hear about the gun battles, the escape attempts (thirty-six prisoners in fourteen attempts; twenty-three caught alive, six killed, two drowned and five, including Morris and the Anglin brothers, listed as missing presumed drowned). Stories about Al Capone and the Birdman of Alcatraz are also standard fare. And in case you didn’t already know this, I have to break it to you: the Birdman was no Burt Lancaster. He was an extremely violent man who knew a lot about canaries, though he wasn’t allowed to keep the birds when he was held at Alcatraz.
I worked on the island through 2015 into 2016. The work on salvaging the gardens began back in 2003. Trees and flowers are still found under ivy so thick that it literally holds up fences and buildings, so old that its stems are the size of tree trunks. One cold, sunny day I was on the rocky banks on the east side, attempting to pull out ivy that hadn’t been touched since 1963, before I realised that if I succeeded in getting rid of it all, I’d have nothing to stand on. Some of the banks of the island are unpredictable, not solid rock but piles of the rubble of former buildings. This is how, I realise, you end up with ruins being discovered metres below street level.
We planted survivor irises—long, gnarled rhizomes more than forty years old—in soil hardened by the long Californian drought. In truth, though, it’s always been dry out there and the gardens had always been planted with species tough enough to cope without water. In the 1930s, after the island was handed over to the federal government by the military, the warden’s secretary, Fred Reichel, asked the California Horticultural Society to suggest seedlings that might do well on the island. Many of the species that he imported came from the Mediterranean and were among those that flourished through the years of neglect. As well, fifteen rose species survived, including the French Bardou Job, a Welsh rose that hadn’t been seen in Wales for more than a hundred years. There are gnarly old figs. There are agave that stand four metres tall and artichokes that flower violent purple, heavy with pollen, bees and humming birds. The humming birds zip and buzz in a series of straight lines, up down, left right. One day a tiny brown one, I suppose it could be described as plain, pivoted in such a manner as to display its throat and reveal a streak of fuchsia pink of startling intensity. Perfect. And then it was gone.
When he was in his eighties Elliot Michener wrote: ‘The hillside provided a refuge from the disturbances of the prison, the work a release; and it became an obsession. This one thing I would do well.’ When I worked it I thought of the western side of the island as Michener’s side. The windier side. The side where the succulents grow. I found that side more beautiful, by which I mean wilder. Over time some of the women I worked with came to refer to one particularly steep slope as ‘Sophie’s Slope’ and I’m hard pressed to think of an accolade that’s made me happier. I removed the oxalis that grew over and strangled the aloe vera, lying on my stomach at an angle of forty-five degrees, trying to maintain purchase without destroying the plants. It was spiky work from which I’d return home covered in scrapes and cuts. The slope looked much better over the months I worked on it but my friend Janice kept reminding me that the oxalis would just come back and she was right, it always did.
But there was something about freeing the spiky invasive plants, avoiding the aggressive Pacific gulls who were nesting, listening to the clank of the buoys, the occasional grunts of the seals, the sound of the fog horns, that filled me with joy. If I paused in my task I could sit and watch the fog snake under the bridge and across the bay; the container ships cut a swathe through the water. And I knew, because I’d seen them when standing on the mainland, that whales were feeding on schools of anchovies.
When I’d had enough of that job I’d move around to one of Michener’s succulent gardens, where ninety-year-old Aeonium had raised the land a metre in the decades since they were planted. I pulled on ivy, following it to its source. Attempting to destroy it but knowing, in my heart, that there was no beating it, and that wasn’t the point. And after each visit, as I headed for the ferry, I’d pat my fellow Australian, the survivor tea tree that scraped its arthritic long fingers along the ground.
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1 ‘The Plant Men of Alcatraz’, Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times, June 21, 2001.
MORETON BAY FIG
(Ficus macrophylla)
There is no such thing as a forest. There are individual trees, individual animals, individual birds…Trees have entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless a tree has first met an obligation to grow roots modestly, to drop bark and leaves discreetly, to provide shade but not block sunlight, and never to drop its limbs upon property owned by other individuals.
MARGARET THATCHER (kind of)
THE Meeting Tree is a massive 150-year-old Moreton Bay fig in the Carlton Gardens. It is one of the most beautiful in Melbourne, and has long been a meeting and gathering place for Aboriginal people still living in the city.
Can you see it there? That big tree? In fact there’s two and that’s where the Aboriginal community, both before the war and when the war was on, would come and meet…on Saturday and Sunday, and during the week, but mostly weekends, everybody would come here and sit around these Moreton Bay Fig Trees. That was our meeting place in the late [19]30s and ’40s and maybe early ’50s.1
It hosts fewer meetings now, but homeless people keep clothes in its nooks and crannies. Revellers leave beer cans. When I walk past the Meeting Tree, as I do most days, I know that I am home. I think of those who lived here millennia before my Anglo-Saxon lot lobbed on them. I think of how the city has changed since I was born here, more than fifty years ago.
At night the fig is full of large and raucous fruit bats, a welcome (to me) addition to the Melbourne scene, though they can leave damage in their wake. They started arriving in the late eighties, having been driven south by habitat clearing and rising temperatures, and because of the food offered by the residential native gardens Melburnians were establishing. There was a campaign, one that drew out for years, to discourage them from using t
he Botanic Gardens. That story had a happy ending and the roosts relocated to a now successful colony of some fifty thousand bats at Yarra Bend Park.
Before the bats relocated, the sky above my house went dark with them. By contrast the few that fly over our house and head for the Meeting Tree number in the tens. I’m not sure if that’s because of the move or heat stress, but there is no doubt that tens of thousands die each summer when temperatures spike. Flying foxes are experiencing the greatest mammalian mass deaths in the world. The dying and dead bats fall from the trees and lie in piles below them. Possums fall as well, though in smaller numbers. Ringtail possums suffer the worst, it seems. Birds spread their wings and take to the air to cool down but they too can come crashing to the baking earth. Some days I choose not to think about these things. Instead I appreciate the hard edges of the fruit bats’ wings silhouetted against the sky, their naughty, pointy faces. I walk under the Meeting Tree soon after dusk for the joy of ducking as the bats come in to land, swooping under the tree boughs, dragging them down, shrieking as they battle to find a spot to hang.
I thought of the Meeting Tree every time I met the Moreton Bay fig in the Mission, a tree that I visited from time to time: two Australian expats shooting the breeze. Moreton Bay figs are native to eastern Australia but you find them throughout California. The tallest one in California is found in San Diego. The widest is found in Santa Barbara and was planted in 1876, reportedly by a young girl who was given a seedling by an Australian sailor. The Moreton Bay fig I hung out with in the Mission was a hundred years old and lived on Cesar Chavez Street, next to St Luke’s Hospital. It was one of the oldest in San Francisco and one of only twenty ‘significant’ landmark trees in the city.
City of Trees Page 8
